


stars around my scars

by Ladybug_21



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Inspired by Taylor Swift, Plus Surprising Amounts of Angst, Worst Cop in Britain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:14:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27613325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: Alec Hardy learns, to his unending dismay, that he is the inspiration for Taylor Swift's new album.
Relationships: Alec Hardy & Ellie Miller
Comments: 10
Kudos: 32





	stars around my scars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shiguresflower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shiguresflower/gifts), [Ghostly_Business](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostly_Business/gifts).



> Because my friends are the most delightfully distracting people on earth, Shiguresflower sent me [this clip](https://youtu.be/3e0b9CZ3GFQ), knowing FULL WELL that it was going to destroy my concentration for the rest of the evening. I may have screamed. Like, literally screamed. Tay Tay is the sweetest! Olivia Colman has Taylor's boyfriend's phone number! Phoebe Waller-Bridge [plays the 'ukulele](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmB7CwsXFUk)! Basically, I am *dead* on every count imaginable. And I also have a newfound appreciation for Shaun Dooley (Ricky Gillespie), whom I'd only ever seen in _Broadchurch_ and _Gentleman Jack_ , and he seems like an absolute sweetheart, so people really need to stop casting him as truly despicable characters.
> 
> Anyway, having suddenly discovered that TSwift is a ['massive' _Broadchurch_ fan](https://youtu.be/3e0b9CZ3GFQ?t=162), this was inevitable. I own no rights to the show, nor to any of Taylor Swift's music—including 'cardigan', from which the title of this fic was taken (because I may have listened all the way through _folklore_ while slamming this out).

Ellie arrived at the police station expecting it to be as nice and normal a Friday morning as one could ever expect with crimes being investigated left and right. But the instant she walked through the door, Brian grabbed her by the elbow and steered her into the kitchenette.

"Have you seen the news?" he asked, almost gravely.

"What? No!" Ellie furrowed her brow, hoping that no new bodies had been found on the beach recently. "Why, what's happened?"

"You don't follow your own nephew's tweets?" Brian pressed.

"Oh, Jesus," sighed Ellie. If Olly had done something else irredeemably stupid that smacked of journalistic malpractice, she was going to push him off of the bloody cliffs herself and deal with whatever Lucy had to say about it later. "Just give me the bad news, Brian, my nerves can only handle so much."

"Hang on, then..."

Brian paused to pull out his mobile, found the tweet in question, and passed the phone over. Ellie blinked, looked up at Brian, blinked again, and looked back down at the screen.

_BREAKING: New Taylor Swift Album Inspired by Broadchurch Detective Inspector_

"Maggie's going to sack him," Ellie said automatically. "Or, you know what, maybe just outright kill him. One or the other, for posting blatant misinformation to _The Echo_ 's official Twitter handle..."

"It's linked to an article from _The Guardian_ ," Brian pointed out, leaning against the counter. "Seems legitimate to me."

Ellie aggressively poked at the screen until the link opened onto an article sporting Alec Hardy's photograph at the top.

"I'm sorry, is it April Fools' Day?" she asked numbly, knowing full well that it was November.

"Face it, Ellie," Brian grinned, "Shitface is moving up in the world."

"Has anyone told _him_?!" Ellie asked, still trying to wrap her brain around this new information.

"As if any of the rest of us would stand a chance of making it through the process alive," Brian snorted. He clapped Ellie on the shoulder as he stood. "The honour's all yours, Millah."

"Oh, shut up," grumbled Ellie.

Ellie took a moment to read the rest of the _Guardian_ article, before anything else. Mostly because she couldn't fathom why _Taylor Swift_ , America's musical sweetheart, even knew that Alec Hardy _existed_. Her jaw more or less dropped when she finally found the answer.

 _"I was skimming the news one day," Swift explained, "and I read this great article from a small English newspaper about this man who'd been dubbed 'the worst cop in Britain'. But then, only a few months later, he had this massive turnaround and solved two big murders in a row. And I just thought, wow, what an amazing, redemptive story. So, first I wrote 'clifftops' and then 'bluebells' about the two murders themselves, and then the rest of_ worst cop in britain _just kinda fell into place. I think it might be my best album yet. It really captures the resilience of the human spirit, even within all of the sadness and loss."_

Un-fucking-believable.

"Sir?" said Ellie, knocking on Alec's door. "Er, good morning."

Alec looked up at her from the enormous stack of papers he was reviewing.

"Something wrong, Miller?"

"Er, well, let's define 'wrong' first, shall we?" Ellie closed the door. "You know Taylor Swift?"

Alec wrinkled his nose.

"Is it possible to be the father of a teenage girl and _not_ know who Taylor Swift is?"

"Right," agreed Ellie. "You, er, checked your phone since you got into work today?"

Alec, grumbling, pulled his phone from the pocket of the coat draped over the back of his chair. When he saw the flurry of text notifications, his eyebrows flew up.

"From Tess: _So, I know I said that we are never, ever, ever getting back together,_ _but..._ " Alec stopped muttering to himself and frowned. "Miller, why've my daughter and my ex each texted me at least twenty times apiece within the past two hours, asking me to call them already?"

"Maybe you should?" Ellie suggested, with what she hoped was an innocent smile.

Alec harrumphed, but hit the call button on his mobile and put it to his ear.

"Hey, Daisy, is everything..." Alec winced and jerked the phone away from his ear, and Ellie bit her lip trying not to laugh at how loudly Daisy was shrieking over the phone. "Wait, slow down, Taylor Swift _what?!_ " He glanced up at Ellie, his free hand on his forehead, panic in his eyes. "Oh, you've got to be bloody _kidding_ me. Er, Daise, I'll talk to you later, all right?"

Ellie could only imagine how ridiculously she must be smiling as Alec hung up and glowered at her.

"Oh, shut _up_ , Miller," he groaned.

"I didn't say anything!" Ellie protested.

"Never mind." Alec seized his coat. "Come on, I am _not_ hanging around to endure the scorn of the entire station for the next several hours."

Ellie followed Alec, grinning giddily.

"Well, there's no need to look quite so glum!" Brian remarked as they passed. "Why don't you just... shake it off?"

"Ah, don't bother trying, Brian," Ellie replied with a smirk. "You know that haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate..."

" _Miller, stop singing_ ," snapped Alec, and he stormed out the door, Ellie following cheerfully in his wake.

* * *

"What am I going to _do_?" Alec groaned for the umpteenth time.

Ellie patted his arm with as much mock-sympathy as she could muster, still trying not to burst into laughter.

"You could stop trying to drown your newfound international celebrity status in mid-morning alcohol and act like a bloody adult?" she suggested.

Alec glared, threw back the rest of his gin, and gestured to Becca for another.

"I think this might be defamation," he declared.

"Don't be such a knob," Ellie snorted, "you are _not_ suing Taylor Swift for writing a series of bittersweet, folksy breakup songs based on you and your travails."

"Oh, am I not? Are _you_ going to stop me from picking up my phone right now and offering Jocelyn Knight the most high-profile case of her entire bloody career?!"

Alec, with a sharp jerk of his head, nodded his thanks to Becca as she set down his new drink.

"Would you be amazed, sir, if I told you that I don't think that anyone outside of Broadchurch _cares_ about who you are?" Ellie offered. "Even if you're somehow suddenly the muse of one of the most popular singer-songwriters on earth, no one's gonna come all the way out here to track down the _actual_ you, they'll just listen to the album and maybe look up an article or two about Sandbrook, if they're really _that_ interested..."

But at that moment, Olly burst through the door of the Traders, out of breath.

"Oh, thank god!" he panted. "Wanted to find you before the rest of the crowd figures out where you are."

Alec shot Ellie a meaningful glance.

" _No_ ," he added firmly to Olly.

"Just a statement or two," pleaded Olly, "Maggie'll have my hide if I come back with nothing to print, since we're the local press and all, and you _know_ us..."

"Christ, Oliver, this is all your fault, in the first place!" Alec snapped at him.

"It's not _my_ fault!" Olly protested. "If I had ever thought that _Taylor Swift_ was going to read any of my pieces on the Latimer case... by the way, has she actually been in touch with you, any chance you have her number...?"

" _Olly_ ," growled Ellie, and she grabbed her nephew by his arm and bodily dragged him through the foyer and out the door. "All right, stop harassing my boss, don't you _dare_ tell the rest of the reporters who've shown up where he is, and for god's sake, stop deluding yourself that Taylor Swift would even give you the time of day, if you did somehow end up with her number!"

"Maybe I was asking for _professional_ reasons," Olly countered. "Get a quote from her, something like that. Although, you have to admit, Auntie Ellie, I'm not the _worst_ that an extremely fit American pop star could do for herself..."

Ellie nudged Olly a bit further out the door, then slammed and locked it before he could get back in. She returned to find Becca flirting rather ostentatiously with Alec, who looked supremely unimpressed.

"Don't be _silly_ , the gin's on me, my suddenly famous husband," Becca said with a wink to Alec, before she noticed that Ellie had returned with the general demeanour of a storm cloud.

"Sir, we'd better clear out before the hordes descend," Ellie growled. "Come on, up you get."

Alec was a touch unsteady from two consecutive shots of gin and no breakfast, so Ellie put a hand under his elbow and glared daggers at Becca when she attempted to help.

"And for god's sake, Alec, didn't you learn _anything_ from that entire trial?" she hissed, jerking her head in the innkeeper's direction. "If the mere _thought_ of shagging that horrible woman goes through your mind..."

Alec blinked at Ellie.

"Oh, come off it, Miller, d'you really think I'm that stupid?" he said, deadpan. "I knew she was trouble when she walked in."

* * *

"But really, what _am_ I going to do?" Alec repeated yet again, a hopeless look in his eyes even though he'd sobered up quite a bit since they'd left the Traders.

"You could always try praying for divine deliverance?" muttered Ellie sullenly. She had parked the car just off the road out on the edge of one of the cliffs, and the two police officers were splitting an old bag of crisps that Ellie had found in the backseat, watching the gulls circle overhead. Ellie had only just quashed Alec's proposal of undergoing witness protection, but he still wasn't giving up the idea of filing a defamation lawsuit, to her extreme annoyance.

"Nah," said Alec after a moment, "I'm not quite that desperate. Besides, how much do you want to bet that Paul Coates can play at least four Taylor Swift songs on his guitar and would try to talk me into accepting that this is a blessing of some sort?"

Ellie couldn't argue too much with that possibility, so instead she turned on the radio and flipped through various stations until she found one playing the new album. The two police officers listened through a verse and a half of 'bluebells' before Ellie realised that the lyrics were told from the perspectives of Lee Ashworth and Ricky Gillespie. She turned off the radio with a scowl, very much hoping that 'clifftops' was told from any perspective other than that of her fucking ex-husband.

"Look, you're only going to be interesting to the international press corps for so long," she pointed out. "So, best to go back into town, tell them all to piss off, and wait for them to get bored and leave. It's worked for both of us in the past, after all. I'm more than happy to do any and all shouting necessary."

Alec made a noncommittal noise, staring listlessly out his window.

"Is this going to be my legacy to the world, Miller?" he asked suddenly.

"Sir?"

"You know." Alec sighed. "You work hard all your life, trying to make the world a better, safer place. And yeah, sometimes you have to deal with the bloody press twisting things into pretzels, sometimes there are investigations and trials that turn you inside out, sometimes you feel like you can't control the narrative of your own life at all. Makes you feel like shit, but it comes with the territory, you know? You go into the profession expecting it. But this? Miller, teenagers are going to be sobbing into their pillows after messy breakups to all of this. All of the hard work—the actual pain and suffering that I've gone through, and that you've gone through, and that so many people in this town have gone through—just, gone. Poof. Diminished into a punchline by some girl with a guitar who liked a soubriquet that the press once gave me. Who's gonna remember Pippa Gillespie and Lisa Newbery and Danny Latimer, once everything else fades away and all we have are some impressionistic lyrics about bluebells and water, as told from the perspective of Ricky fucking Gillespie?"

Ellie frowned, because Alec did have a point. Who knew how Beth and Mark and Chloe were reacting to having their family's trauma dredged back up and flung as a spectacle across the entire globe via YouTube and Spotify? Who knew how Ellie herself would be feeling, by the time she'd figured out exactly how her own family's tragedies were portrayed?

"Could always have someone dramatise the actual story into an ITV series?" she offered, quirking a smile at Alec. "As a counter-narrative, you know."

Alec huffed softly.

"Come on, Hardy," sighed Ellie, crumpling the crisps bag. "Not like anything's going to get any better if we sit here for the rest of the day."

The reporters were swarming about the Broadchurch police station when Ellie's car appeared, but she kept the windows rolled up and kept the car moving at a persistent enough speed that they made it into the safety of the car park with no questions answered and no reporters run over. Alec made a bee line for his office, once they were back inside, and when Brian sidled up to Ellie with a grin, she shook her head at him seriously and sat down at her desk. Then, because she doubted anyone was going to try to stop her, she plugged her headphones into her mobile and pulled up the full playlist for _worst cop in britain_ as she turned her computer on to get some work done.

And... it was incredible.

'clifftops' was not told from Joe's perspective, thank god. Nor was it told from Alec's. It was told from Beth's perspective, so piercingly and so honestly that tears sprang to Ellie's eyes. And only the first two verses of 'bluebells' were told from the perspective of the murderers; after that, the song became about Alec, and his determination to push past the water and through the bluebells and beyond the lies to find the truth. 'pacemaker' too was about Alec, a steady rhythm like a broken pulse underpinning lyrics about betrayal and heartbreak; 'witness' was about watching people you thought you knew get up on the stand and reveal truths that you weren't expecting. (After watching Ellie sniffle for a solid twenty minutes, Brian eventually dropped a box of tissues on her desk and walked away shaking his head a bit.)

But the song that Ellie expected least was 'phoenix' because it was about _her_. It was a story about a fiery woman whose world was burnt to the ground, but who rose from the ashes, undaunted. The lyrics were frank about the shit that life could throw at you, but the chorus wavered between major and minor, balancing anger with optimism. Ellie found herself nodding along a bit to the beat from where she sat, still sobbing.

Yeah, a lot of real life had been left out of the new album. But somehow, Taylor bloody Swift had managed to capture the essentials of the past several years of Alec Hardy's life, along with the rest of Broadchurch and the ordeal it had been through.

 _Have you listened yet?_ Beth texted in the middle of the day, when Ellie was listening through the entire album for the fourth time in a row.

 _I cried through your song_ , Ellie replied.

 _I cried through yours_ , Beth answered. _And the rest of it, to be honest. It's brilliant._

The album was such a distraction that Ellie stopped listening to it mid-afternoon and accepted that she was going to have to stay hours late on a Friday evening to catch up on work. Eventually, it was just her and Hardy, who had barely moved from behind his closed door all day.

"I think the press have finally all gone to dinner, for what it's worth," she commented as Alec finally re-emerged with his coat on. "Might be a good time to slip out. You listened to it yet? The whole thing, I mean."

"Not today, Miller," sighed Alec. "Need to get used to the idea first. Not sure I can live through Sandbrook all over again, without some time to prepare."

"Yeah." Ellie paused. "Sir, will you promise me something?"

Alec raised his eyebrows. And Ellie knew that there were any number of things that she wanted to say right then, some of which concerned Alec not antagonising the reporters too much, some of which concerned staying well away from Becca Fisher, some of which concerned calling Ellie if he wanted or needed to talk about anything and everything concerning the songs on the new album. But somehow, Ellie felt that Alec already understood that all of those requests were on the table.

"Don't sue Taylor Swift," she said instead. "Not that I think you'll want to, once you've taken a listen. But I can think of a dozen other better ways to waste your time and money. And besides, nothing's going to make you seem like the _actual_ worst cop in Britain like suing someone who's just written a whole album of songs for you."

And Alec nodded begrudgingly before quietly stepping out into the night.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow wow wow, this was going to be pure crack, and then actually got far more emotional than I think anyone intended (including me). Thanks for going with me on this journey, at any rate? Additional note: Further research indicates that Taylor Swift's boyfriend is Joe Alwyn, who played that sad guy that Emma Stone's character married in _The Favourite_ , so it actually makes complete and total sense that Olivia Colman has his number. 😅


End file.
